This room in the Trump penthouse includes a statue of Eros and Psyche, a painting of Apollo in his chariot, and Barron Trump’s motorized Mercedes.

It has become commonplace to ridicule Donald Trump as “tacky” and dismiss his material style as clumsy excess, a crass display of wealth, or a complete absence of “good taste.” For instance, in 2015 the National Review’s Kevin Williamson called the newly declared Presidential candidate a “ridiculous buffoon with the worst taste since Caligula.” Williamson illustrated Trump’s taste with pictures of his densely gilded Manhattan penthouse replete with simulated classical aesthetics, Louis XIV furnishings, and a motorized toy Mercedes 10-year-old son Barron has outgrown. In 2012 refinery29 interviewed Trump’s wife Melania and somewhat more kindly indicated that the penthouse had “over-the-top surroundings that might make Liberace blush.” A host of anxious observers fret that the new President will gut the White House with a similar ocean of gilding, marble, and haphazardly assembled historical themes. In the wake of Trump’s unlikely victory, The Mirror predicted a White House festooned with “gold cherubs, reproduction Renoirs—or a print of Melania naked on a rug from her GQ lads mag shoot”; in a similar vein, the New York Daily News predicted “gaudy gold décor and tacky touches.”

Trump’s branded products include “Trump Ice” water.

It is easy to caricature Trump’s style, and Trump’s grandiose materiality and unfiltered public behavior make for fascinating if unsettling media theater. However, dismissing that style risks ignoring the appeal of his distinctive tackiness. The President-Elect appears to have long fancied vulgar displays of affluence as he has migrated from one opulent mansion to the next, indulged an affection for grandiose hotels and golf courses, and hawked expensive steaks, ties, wine, mineral water, and fragrance. That style is tacky in the sense that it is a blatant transgression of the aesthetic, social, and material standards that constitute “good taste.” “Good taste” certainly is dispensed by stylistic ideologues and marketers for self-interested reasons, but tacky is heartfelt: rather than view his penthouse as a transgression of stylistic restraint or good taste, Trump once told The Apprenticecontestants visiting the penthouse that “Some people consider it to be the greatest apartment in the world. I would never, ever say that myself—but it’s certainly a nice apartment.” Trump’s style is absolutely populist in its visual and material accessibility: his massive opulently decorated homes signal wealth without any uneasiness over (or possibly awareness of) his privilege, implicitly establishing that wealth is a just confirmation of achievement.

Like all kitsch, Trump’s Manhattan penthouse is a formulaic repackaging of the familiar, amplifying existing cultural traditions and historical styles. For instance, the classically themed paintings covering the ceilings of the Manhattan penthouse invoke familiar Classical aesthetics; a massive statue of Cupid and Psyche invokes a Classical tale retold for millennia; and the reproduction of a Renoir in Melania Trump’s office displays the well-known impressionist tradition in a room alongside an ornate Louis XIV style desk (in 1996 Playboy writer Mark Bowden also was surprised to find a Renoir on Trump’s gilded airplane). These familiar motifs are ideologically rooted in Western artistic and cultural traditions, and their display in the densely decorated penthouse perhaps validates those traditions. Nevertheless, those things are not simply symbols representing Classical artistic traditions or overdone displays of wealth: Trump’s apartment may instead be a soliloquy confirming the consequence of his own idiosyncratic individual taste.

Melania Trump in the Trump Tower Penthouse in 2012.

Most critical analysis of Trump and material style has focused on the objects and architectural spaces with which he has surrounded himself, but of course his body and the bodies of his family cannot be separated from the President-Elect’s materiality. No element of that corporeality is better known than his astounding hair, and the President-Elect seems determined to unite a nation of people with bad hair by embracing his color job and unruly comb-over as yet another symbol of his individuality: “My hair may not be perfect, but it’s mine.” His wife Melania often looms as an accessory, apparently evoking his appreciation of beautiful and thoughtful women (in a clumsy celebration of beauty, he told Fox News in an hour-long post-election interview that “beauty is a nice thing but after the first hour you need to talk to them”). Melania sold a reasonably priced jewelry line on QVC that borrowed the signature Trump bling, but it appears to have been removed from sale this summer. In contrast, Trump’s daughter Ivanka has long been among the most prominent family members, and when the President-Elect had his first post-election interview on 60 Minutes, Ivanka appeared wearing a $10,800 bracelet from her jewelry line.

The New York Penthouse is awash with gilding and marble.

The President-Elect’s ostentatious material culture might seem to separate him from the working-class voters he courted. When Fox News interviewed the Presidential candidate in September, they hoped to narrate his story with “treasured objects he’s chosen to keep” in his Manhattan penthouse. It was a clever idea to use some prosaic things to humanize Trump (albeit in the midst of his gilded penthouse), but the choice of a military school yearbook, a childhood photograph, and Barron’s Mercedes were not especially rich springboards establishing Trump’s common humanity with the electorate. Nevertheless, the President-Elect’s tacky self-confidence seems to endear him to many Americans. Trump’s materiality and his unfiltered public behavior ignore mainstream style, and rather than recoil from this some people seem mesmerized by his highly individual expressions of taste: for instance, while he could follow conventional styles and behaviors, Trump apparently decorated his penthouse the way he desired with no concern for dominant styles (though the penthouse was designed in 1985 by New York’s “glitziest interior designer” Angelo Donghia); and while he could probably secure a more creative hair stylist the President-Elect has brazenly embraced his golden mane without betraying any irony.

In contrast, much of the President-Elect’s political circle is populated by non-descript White men whose material culture betrays no especially clear signs of their ideological bent or wealth. The prototype may be Vice President-Elect Mike Pence, who is touted as a “small town” Midwesterner and has nearly no distinguishing material style except for his motionless white hair. Pence’s unremarkable plain-ness leaves him somewhat unexamined as a material thing; while Trump exploits his own distinctive materiality to paint himself as a political outsider, Pence instead seamlessly blends into the crowd of Washington Republicans and champions conservative religious legislation while viewing climate change science very skeptically.

The most unsettling Trump supporters gather under the banner “alt-right.” The alt-right lingers on the edges of far right Republican politics, framing a White nationalist political agenda, railing on immigration, and championing anti-Semitism, sweeping deportation programs, and eugenic solutions. Their startling agenda conceals itself within rather prosaic dress and materiality. The ideologues on the alt-right aspire to use fashion in particular to distinguish them from the material caricature of hate groups like the Klan, Nazis, or eugenicists, despite their genuine social, historical, and intellectual debt to those very groups. In August 2016 the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok described the prominent alt-right National Policy Institute as “suit-and-tie racists.” In 2013 the National Policy Institute’s Richard B. Spencer told Salon’s Lauren M. Fox that “`We have to look good.” Spencer argued that the alt-right’s cause would be undermined if they appeared to be “`part of something that is crazed or ugly or vicious or just stupid, no one is going to want to be a part of it.’ Those stereotypes of `redneck, tattooed, illiterate, no-teeth’ people, Spencer said, are blocking his progress.” Clad in commonplace business dress, Spencer and the National Policy Institute advocate for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” that would include sterilization, with a fundamental goal “to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights.” In the wake of the election the National Policy Institute met in Washington and Spencer quoted Nazi propaganda in German while celebrating that Trump’s victory signaled that White people are “awakening to their own identity.”

Gilded cherubs can be found in the Trumps’ penthouse dining room.

It is not essential to pin down precisely what constitutes tacky; the more important point is to acknowledge that an ambiguous notion of tastefulness and style is constantly wielded to pass judgment on people who depart from mainstream style. Ironically, some of Trump’s appeal may rest on his image as a “tacky” individual who owns up to and brazenly displays his taste and thoughts; while that tackiness may be repulsive to left-leaning Americans, it is conversely compelling to many of their neighbors who feel judged and excluded themselves. There is of course a profoundly complicated class, color, and social analysis of how Trump ascended to the highest office in the land, and Trump’s construction in the media and popular discourse deserves a sustained analysis. Yet there is also an archaeological dimension to understanding Trump as a material thing, Trump’s material style has successfully fashioned an appearance of defying dominant stylistic standards, ignoring conventional political practices, and remaining true to himself that harbors enormous appeal to many Americans.

]]>https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/the-triumph-of-tackiness-the-materiality-of-trump/feed/0perinel-trump-penthouse-1paulmullinsThis room in the Trump penthouse includes a statue of Eros and Psyche, a painting of Apollo in his chariot, and Barron Trump's motorized Mercedes.Trump's branded products include "Trump Ice" water.perinel-m-trump-officeMelania Trump in the Trump Tower Penthouse in 2-12.The New York Penthouse is awash with gilding and marble.Gilded cherubs can be found in the penthouse dining room.Preserving Repugnant Heritagehttps://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/10/28/preserving-repugnant-heritage/
https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/10/28/preserving-repugnant-heritage/#commentsFri, 28 Oct 2016 13:29:47 +0000http://paulmullins.wordpress.com/?p=3791]]>

A January 2016 image of a makeshift Calais library (image Katja Ulbert).

Administrators’ commitment to dismantle the camp (by hand rather than bulldozer or fire, to avoid conflicts from earlier camp displacements) seems to confirm the camp’s significance. Perhaps for most observers Calais can lay no claim to be a heritage site since it is an ephemeral place in our midst, yet Calais may be just the sort of place worthy of heritage contemplation—that is, a material presence inducing contemporary anxiety and rooted in a contentious history.

The silence over Calais stands in opposition to the flurry of heritage scholars advocating the preservation of Adolf Hitler’s birthplace and earliest home in Braunau am Inn, Austria. Both Calais and Braunau share a repugnancy that revolves around their unpleasant stories and unresolved effects. Hitler holds a persistent grip on our collective imagination and exerts an especially unsettling effect on right wing extremists; Calais lays bare the crisis of humanitarian idealism that risks being undone by state passivity and xenophobia. In both cases some planners hope that razing these reviled spaces will eliminate the public discussions they spark, but there seems to be a more productive discussion harbored in their preservation than in their absence.

The 1989 Memorial Stone Against War and Fascism at Hitler’s birthplace (image Anton Kurt).

For many observers the demolition of the building is simply a clumsy if not misguided effort to escape an unpleasant history that will not be erased by the wrecking ball. Mely Kiyak argued in Zeit Onlinethat tearing down the house constituted “a political declaration of surrender” to unwelcome tourists and neo-Nazi pilgrims. She concluded that it is impossible to simply erase the Nazi landscape, conceding that any neo-Nazi who “wants to follow Hitler’s footsteps can do so throughout Europe.” Kiyak suggested that the Braunau site would always be a “Nazi place” regardless of radical transformations or wrecking balls, and she argued that combatting neo-Nazi visitors required an assault on their racist and xenophobic fabrication of Hitler and Nazi history. Like many sites associated with the Nazis, Hitler’s birthplace is a reviled place for some Austrians traumatized by the specter of fascist tourists. Nevertheless, Kiyak is almost certainly correct that even the most thorough material cleansing of the site will not transform how neo-Nazis view Hitler’s history or Nazi materiality.

Calais Camp Evictions in March 2016 (image AmirahBreen).

Now heritage professionals aspire to preserve Hitler’s home as a self-reflective place if not a provocative material wound, and perhaps that is a productive role for many dark heritage places. Calais is a comparably raw albeit utterly fresh wound, but its failure to secure the same attention as Hitler’s Austrian birthplace suggests Calais is much more difficult to accommodate to authorized heritage discourses. This perhaps reflects Calais’ ephemerality and the basic challenge of how to interpret Calais as a material place. It also suggests that much of the story heritage planners wish to tell on World War II sites like Hitler’s birthplace is firmly situated in the past and distanced from their contemporary effects, which include curious war tourists and neo-Nazi pilgrims alike. Calais may heighten viewers’ anxiety because of its utterly mundane and present-day material forms: that is, the camps at Calais were a mix of shipping containers, bicycles, clothing, tarps, portable toilets, and of course anguished people that are familiar to most observers. Dark heritage thrives on its capacity to create uneasiness, and both Braunau and Calais induce some discomfort with a heritage that reaches into the present. However, the apparent reluctance to frame Calais as a potentially rich interpretive space like Hitler’s birthplace may indicate the camps are simply too familiar and reviled to be comfortably embraced.

]]>https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/10/28/preserving-repugnant-heritage/feed/5paulmullinsA January 2016 image of the Calais "Jungle" (image Malachy Browne).A January 2016 image of a makeshift Calais library (image Katja Ulbert). The Hitler birthplace in 2008 (image ).The 1989 Memorial Stone Against War and Fascism at Hitler's birthplace (image Anton Kurt).Calais Camp Evictions in March 2016 (image AmirahBreen).The Last Holdouts: Community Displacement and Urban Renewal on the IUPUI Campushttps://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/10/09/the-last-holdouts-community-displacement-and-urban-renewal-on-the-iupui-campus/
https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/10/09/the-last-holdouts-community-displacement-and-urban-renewal-on-the-iupui-campus/#respondSun, 09 Oct 2016 22:16:08 +0000http://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/10/09/the-last-holdouts-community-displacement-and-urban-renewal-on-the-iupui-campus/Invisible Indianapolis: In April, 1980 the home at 725 West vermont Street sat in the center of this picture of the IUPUI campus. 311 Bright Street stood just to its south at the right side of the image (click for larger image). In 1874 the first residents moved into 311 Bright Street…]]>

Some readers interested in post-war urban displacement, race, and Indianapolis histories may be interested in this piece from the Invisible Indianapolis blog.

In April, 1980 the home at 725 West vermont Street sat in the center of this picture of the IUPUI campus. 311 Bright Street stood just to its south at the right side of the image (click for larger image).

In 1874 the first residents moved into 311 Bright Street in Indianapolis’ near-Westside. The modest frame house sat in the midst of a neighborhood that rapidly emerged after the Civil War. It sat across the street from Garden Baptist Church, which opened in 1872, alongside 36 houses in the two blocks between New York and Michigan Streets.

The same year the house was built on Bright Street Ira Johnson was born in Cassville, Georgia. Johnson, his wife Lillian, and their 13 children worked on farms in and around Bartow County, Georgia for more than 50 years. Lillian died in 1923, and in about 1930 Ira Johnson moved to Indianapolis. …

In 2013 the Washington Post’s Ken Ringle probed the unsettling experience of visiting Washington’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The museum revolves around traumatic things, images, and narratives that visitors vicariously contemplate across time and in the face of the inexpressible irrationality of hatred. The museum provides some concrete mechanisms like “privacy walls” to avoid some of the most unsettling material and visual dimensions of the museum’s narrative; nevertheless, Ringle argued that the museum perhaps collapsed that distance most effectively when visitors “have to look into the face of someone caught in the Nazi death machine.” The Tower of Faces, for instance, is a massive three-story installation of 1,032 images of the residents of Eishyshok, a community in contemporary Lithuania where the Nazis massacred nearly the entire town in 1941. Ringle argues that the pre-war family photographs are among the museum’s objects, images, and stories that force visitors to confront their “limit” by displaying prosaic humanity while acknowledging how these lives tragically ended.

Cutlery recovered from a holocaust site are typical of the prosaic things that populate much of the Holocaust Museum.

The everyday things populating the archaeological record secure much of their power from their familiarity—personal trinkets like eyeglasses and jewelry, food, and bodily remains themselves narrate humanizing stories, but those sympathetic and even uplifting human experiences are simultaneously complicated by sober realities. Scholars often champion narratives that aspire to define the concrete realities of human adversity if not despair, often with an ambition to examine the lingering effects of historical trauma. Archaeology in particular has gradually shifted its focus from material description toward “dark” histories of enslavement, racism, warfare, sexism, and violence that perhaps strike some observers as a rather bleak picture of everyday life across time and into the present. Human tragedies and adversities materialized in things often spark emotional responses that archaeologists aim to channel into reflective discussion. This may come as a surprise to observers who fantasize archaeology as a dispassionate empirical description of the distant past that has no substantive connection to contemporary life, and some people inevitably will find history’s trail of horrors profoundly disconcerting if not an ideological distortion of a more-or-less placid human experience.

Shoes confiscated from prisoners at Majdanek.

Since historical narratives can be unsettling, academics and museum scholars often caution students and visitors that some scholarly data may be personally distressing. Such practices alerting an audience to emotionally challenging material are sometimes dubbed “trigger warnings,” a darling target for a host of anti-intellectual populists. This week University College-London archaeologist Gabriel Moshenska became the latest scholar to be lampooned over his precaution that students in his Archaeologies of Modern Conflict course should recognize the material may be troubling. Moshenska’s express concern was for military veterans, but predictably shallow media observers with no grasp of archaeology used the course’s caution to launch an attack on a generation of “soft” students and over-indulgent professors.

The Spectator’s Brendan O’Neill unleashed the most hyperbolic attack, ridiculing the notion that “‘bones can be scary.’” Building on his own rich record of right-wing trolling, O’Neill argued that the caution was symptomatic of “the relentless infantilisation of students, the treatment of them as overgrown children liable to be plunged by mere words or images into actual trauma.” The Daily Mailsounded a similar note when it suggested that “students at one of Britain’s leading universities have been given permission to walk out of classes if they find dealing with the past too traumatic.”

In the midst of the Holocaust Museum’s prosaic material objects are the things defining subjects like Jacques Stambul, who was imprisoned in Buchenwald.

These conservative ideologues are disinterested in archaeology, of course, instead using the conflict archaeology course’s caution as a thin pretense to bemoan the liberal academy and sound shallow anti-intellectual mantras. In 2015 Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt melodramatically protested that course cautions are part of a pattern that threatens to “scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.” They argued that “the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided,” complaining that course cautions amount to a “coddling” of American students. O’Neill lays the blame squarely at the feet of academics: “the new campus craziness, the wild allergy to difficult debate and fear of offensive texts, doesn’t always come from students themselves. It’s been institutionalised, among actual academics,” and O’Neill and the Daily Mail alike argue that this infection can be traced back to American academics. America’s prominent conservative Breitbart news has jumped onto the attack on academics, calling Moshenska’s caution yet another example of “Special Snowflake Safe Space Lunacy.” Breitbart theatrically lament that classroom cautions will produce “battlefield archaeology graduates who are triggered by the site of scary bones of people who died horribly.”

Suggesting that course cautions constrain critical discourse and yield a generation of spineless students ignores the profound power of well-told historical narratives, and it certainly underestimates the emotional power of material things. That sway of things is what attracts most archaeologists to the discipline, and archaeologists’ widespread commitment to illuminating untold and often challenging historical experiences unites them with visitors to places like the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Those places aspire to fashion reflective discussions about histories that some people may find unpleasant, and it seems perfectly defensible that even thoughtful scholars and well-prepared visitors would find a visit to Auschwitz or an encounter with the remains of murder victims emotionally unsettling. Indeed, as Alix Mortimer argues, it would be alarming to find scholars who are not moved by their scholarship, especially archaeologists working with contentious narratives and the material traces of tragedy. It might be even more alarming to find archaeologists and professors who have no regard for their students’ experiences.

2015 Spaces for Children: School Gas Chambers and Air Raid Shelters in Second World War Britain. In Reanimating Industrial Spaces, edited by Hilary Orange, pp. 127-137. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California.

This Washington DC home features a massive garage and an eclectic mix of oversized architectural features typical of McMansions (image DC Urban Mom).

Few architectural forms seem to secure as much overwrought disdain as the massive homes that are often referred to as “McMansions.” Architectural aesthetes have a rich history of attacking built environments that spark deep-seated aesthetic and social revulsion, and over-sized 21st-century homes have become targets of comparable critique. Critics of massive residential homes often lament departures from stylistic codes, which typically includes tract mansions’ massive scale, asymmetrical forms, lack of proportionality, inferior materials, and departures from established historical or local architectural distinctions. However, such analyses routinely descend into ethnographically shallow social and class commentaries that fail to wrestle with our inchoate aversion for this particular material form. It is indeed hard to fathom the attraction of many oversized residences, and it is unreasonable to simply ignore our emotional revulsion for them; nevertheless, a compelling assessment of McMansions–and reflective urban planning–should sympathetically wrestle with our experiences of these structures.

McMansion Hell is among the legion of observers ridiculing massive “garage Mahals” and “starter mansions.” McMansion Hell is distinguished by its concrete architectural analysis of oversized residences, spending much of its energy dissecting specific material elements of the pejorative McMansion. This is in some ways an archaeological approach to a class of material things, revolving around systematic material description of specific architectural features that unsettle many observers. McMansion Hell does not try to stake a claim to contrived objectivity, instead acknowledging its aversion for massive residences, sarcastically deconstructing a host of aesthetic features, and painting a very distinctive social and material notion of the stylistic if not social deplorability of tract mansions. However, it focuses on the stylistic dimensions of “bad” architecture and does not feature especially clear ethnographic evidence that might interrogate both the appeal of McMansions and the widespread distaste for them.

Massive homes are routinely criticized for dwarfing neighboring architectural fabric, as in this Los Angeles neighborhood (image from No More McMansions LA).

The massive and affordable luxury home had emerged in many American communities by the mid-1980’s. Jack L. Nasar, Jennifer S. Evans-Cowley, and Vicente Mantero’s 2007 study of over-sized homes found that between 1987 and 2001 the average new home had increased in size from 1900 to 2300 square feet, and “the percentage of new houses with more than 3000 square feet has almost doubled.” By 2003, more than 20% of newly built homes occupied more than 3000 square feet. Yet over that period that houses expanded, the average household size decreased from 3.14 in 1970 to 2.57 in 2000, and house lot sizes decreased as well.

Many commentators simply react emotionally to massive homes; that is, they voice their genuine aversion for such homes but risk an impressionistic response that trades ethnographic insight for dismissive sarcasm. For instance, about.com’s architecture expert Jackie Craven reduces huge homes to tacky displays of affluence, ignoring the roots of desire for such homes: “McMansions are a type of wannabe mansion, built by upper-middle class people with enough down payment money to show off their economic status. . . . Many people love McMansions. Likewise, many people love McDonald’s Big Macs. That doesn’t mean they’re good for you.”

Perhaps one of the most fascinating archaeological dimensions of McMansion rhetoric is the homes’ capacity to induce such emotional declarations of oversized homes’ tackiness and ugliness. For instance, in 2014 the Los Angeles Times’ Ted Rall mounted a measured analysis of tract mansions but was reduced by essay’s end to proclaim that “My main objection to McMansions is that they, like most post-1960s architecture, are not just ticky-tacky but really, really ugly. My eyes! They burn!” It is perhaps honest to acknowledge one’s own sentiments that massive residences are aesthetically uninspired or plain ugly things, but that revulsion deserves its own critique. Naomi Stead (PDF) is wary of the myriad negative impacts of tract mansions, but she acknowledges that McMansions still “tell us about human aspirations, the desire for status and identity, the power of a constructed image of ‘home’ in the popular imaginary.”

This massive home in Minnesota sits especially far-removed from surrounding homes, a theme critics often fix on when examining the social isolation fanned by massive homes (image from Bill Forbes).

The heart of derogatory McMansion rhetoric may be its invocation of McDonalds. George Ritzer popularized the notion of “McDonaldization” to refer to the rationalized efficiency, predictability and disciplining that characterize the fast food chain and an increasingly homogenized social and material world. The Baltimore Sun’s architectural critic Edward Gunts was among the first observers to use the term McMansion in 1990 when he concluded that the newly built Peabody Library “is poorly detailed to boot, with brick stringcourses that don’t line up and stepped granite edging near the sidewalk that seems tacked on like the roof flashing of some cheap suburban McMansion.” Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk used the term McMansion by 1992 to invoke a particular sort of planning that has no substantive roots in place, much like a McDonalds dropped nearly anywhere in the world. They lamented the social isolation fostered by suburbs in general and expanded by monster single-family residences that are “both pretentious and isolated, an island in a sea of strangers and cars.” Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck’s Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream admits that McMansions may well provide a superior private space, a host of rooms and features that are “simply a superior product.” However, they are uneasy “that most suburban residents, the minute they leave this refuge, are confronted by a tawdry and stressful environment.”

For many critics of McMansions in particular and suburban planning in general, many post war residential environments have fanned enormous social isolation as householders retreat to their homes. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck circumspectly concede that the escape into tract mansions may provide a sort of sanctuary “in the finest private realm in the developed world, but our public realm is brutal.” Howard Kunstler has been a sustained critic of such communities and their apparent capacity to socially separate people, arguing in 1999 that “In these large houses people are compensating for the lack of a meaningful public realm or public places. … It’s especially characteristic of suburbia that the private realm is luxurious and the public realm is squalid.” Such critiques revolve around contending visions of community and materiality as well as home and public that violate many communities’ existing sense of space and place. For instance, when President Obama spent part of his 2016 vacation in a massive Martha’s Vineyard home, filmmaker Thomas Bena complained to The Guardian that “the house the Obamas are renting this year is a prime example of the kind of mega-construction that is threatening to destroy the character of the island.” Bena’s case made in his film One Big Home is that “this is more gross than mere conspicuous consumption. …. It’s another type of gentrification. We need to start taking care of our communities and be more careful with land use and zoning.”

Opulent kitchens are often featured in tract mansions like this example in Indianapolis (image from Zillow)

In 2014 Salon’s Thomas Frank took aim on “the undisguised pretentiousness” of suburban mansions, arguing that they were “a product not of some epidemic of vulgarity but of the larger economic changes in the world. By this I do not mean that Americans were being swept up in a wave of extraordinary affluence beginning in the 1980s, but rather that one class of Americans was essentially taking its leave of the rest of us.” Frank is perhaps correct that the post-war suburb was an idealized leveling mechanism in which sameness was celebrated over distinction, an argument made most persuasively by William Whyte’s 1956 classic The Organization Man. However, as Frank acknowledges, the superficially democratic ideal of post-war suburbs masked their class and color boundaries (and Whyte was himself circumspect about the depth of homogeneous appearances). Frank concludes that 1980s McMansion neighborhoods are not remotely democratic and instead are valued as exclusive and pretentious displays of class and social difference: “Inequality is the point of the McMansion, and the McMansion is also, to a certain degree, the point of inequality; it’s the pot of pyrite at the end of the rainbow of shit that we have chosen as a nation to follow.”

Brian Miller’s measured assessment of McMansion media rhetoric argues that much of this discourse wields the McMansion as symbols staking out broader ideological if not moral critiques (compare his blog Legally Sociable). Miller found that the McMansion functions as “a complex term with four distinct meanings: a large house, a relatively large house, a home flawed in architecture or design, and a symbol for more complex issues including sprawl and excessive consumption.” Miller frames the McMansion as a narrative device that continues a longstanding debate over the social and moral implications of suburbanization, home, sprawl, community, and consumption.

Analyses of residential affluence often feature this New Jersey home that appeared in The Sopranos (image DrBob2012 Toronto Prelude Club).

Much of the critique of McMansions revolves around the apparently overdone class theatricality of monster suburban developments. In 2005, for instance, Paul Knox cast oversized mansions and newly affluent suburbs in very unflattering terms, deploring American suburban “landscapes of bigness and spectacle, characterized by packaged developments, simulated settings, and conspicuous consumption, and they have naturalized an ideology of competitive consumption, moral minimalism, and disengagement from notions of social justice and civil society—the peculiar mix of political conservatism and social libertarianism that is the hallmark of contemporary America.” Knox referred to these new suburbs as “Vulgaria,” a landscape that Knox paints in vivid detail: he emphasizes the pretentious symbolism of “tract mansions and starter castles of 3,000 or 4,000 square feet and upwards, featuring two-story entrance halls, great rooms, three- or four-car garages, huge kitchens, spa-sized bathrooms, his-and-hers room-sized master closets, media rooms, fitness centers, home offices, high-tech security systems, and perhaps even an au pair suite.” Rebecca Graff argues that such rhetoric extends a longstanding contempt for material surfaces that reaches back to the Gilded Age itself. Ideologues and aesthetes in the late-19th century and contemporary world alike bluntly dismiss seemingly pretentious displays of wealth that theatrically—if not in-authentically—perform affluence and class ambition.

A typical tract mansion in Plano, Texas (image from Dean Terry).

McMansion Hell’s author argues that the distaste for McMansions is perhaps most firmly rooted in generational divides, with an older generation intent “on owning and having assets and this generation is now more interested in having experiences.” She echoes longstanding anxieties about suburban isolation and car culture that are heightened for younger generations and magnified by tract mansions: “For a lot of young people that grew up in the suburbs, once you reached adolescence, there was a quality of life that was really impacted by the isolation of the suburbs and I think that has played a huge role as to why the younger generation is rejecting this notion of ‘the big house’ and this notion of always being in the car.” Yet sociologist Brian Miller persuasively counters that such broadly painted generational pictures are inevitably clumsy generalizations that fail to wrestle with cross-generational desire for such homes.

A sympathetic view of McMansion residents can still stake a critical position on massive residential tracts and laissez faire community planning policies. For instance, Joel Garreau’s 1991 study Edge City: Life on the New Frontier champions a compassionate view of residents living in what he calls “edge cities.” Garreau argues that edge cities are distinguished by their concentration of workplaces and consumer spaces outside the traditional urban core, typically being placed at the urban periphery near highway interchanges and suburban residential tracts. The edge city is cut from a series of urban forms rooted in expansion out of the urban core that began in the late-19th century, and the oversized mansion can be found in suburbs, urban in-fill (i.e., razing existing homes and building proportionally large homes), and edge cities alike. Garreau’s study is distinguished by his skepticism that urban planners and developers forced various apparently unappealing community forms like suburbs onto Americans; instead, he suggests that Americans have routinely embraced non-traditional community spaces and may actually desire to live in places many observers deplore. Garreau perhaps under-estimates the sway of federal policies on urban settlement patterns, since migration from central business districts has routinely fueled planners’ efforts to engineer communities around classist, racist, and auto-centric and business-friendly policies. However, Garreau breaks from the chorus of urban planning critics in his view that Americans’ imaginations of suburbs, edge cities, and boomburbs is socially consequential.

This Texas mansion somewhat cheekily embraces the notion of a “starter castle” (image from Zillow).

Willow S. Lung-Amam’s analysis of monster homes in Fremont, California defies the commonplace assumption that “tacky” tract mansions confirm their residents’ “inauthentic” affluence. Lung-Amam echoes the familiar argument that “dominant social and cultural norms regarding the proper use and design of suburban space are often reinforced through planning, design, and public policy.” However, she underscores that the “mechanistic neutrality” of such planning norms “tend to privilege extant suburban landscapes and their embedded values, meanings, and ideals, and thereby naturalize and normalize established (and most often white) residents’ privileged sense of place.” Lung-Amam avoids shallow dismissals of tract mansions’ desirability and paints a picture of ostensibly progressive planning policies (e.g., “smart growth” “anti-sprawl,” etc) that reproduce a longstanding state effort to engineer urban landscapes and notions of class and home: “While most exclusionary housing policies tend to discourage poor and working-class minorities from purchasing homes in suburban neighbourhoods, McMansions expose the ways that planning and design professionals, processes, and regulations can disparately impact middle- and upper-class minorities by marginalizing their values, meanings, and desires for their homes and communities.” Lung-Amam’s study of planning in Fremont takes aim on planners and processes that “marginalize minority voices and their participation” and evade the distinctive ways Fremont’s Chinese immigrant residents define home, community, and affluence. In an ocean of scholarship and popular writing attacking McMansions, Lung-Amam provides one of the most sympathetic analyses of tract mansion residents, and that almost certainly is because it is firmly based on ethnographic insight. She concludes that “As many of Fremont’s Chinese immigrants expressed, both publicly and in personal interviews, their visions of what it means to be `at home’ and part of a `community’ are fundamentally different from that of many established, white residents.”

This waterside Indianapolis home mixes a breadth of style and proportions in a 7450 square-foot home (image from Zillow).

Many observers are now reading the death rites to the massive suburban mansion, citing a relatively well-defined decline in square footage; nevertheless, the impending death of oversized tract mansions has been signaled quite a few times over nearly a decade. In 2011 Gawker declared the “McMansion is dead,” and Witold Rybczynski predicted that a five-year housing decline likely spelled the doom of tract mansions; two years later Curbed cautiously wondered if the McMansion was being resurrected; and last week the Hartford Courant once more proclaimed that newly built homes are shrinking in size and massive homes are neither affordable nor desirable for many home owners. The McMansion is perhaps no longer an economically viable investment (or at least not likely to hold its value), and it is possibly true that the pure economics of massive homes make their market unlikely to grow significantly. Nevertheless, there is still consumer desire for such spaces among some prospective homeowners, and the commonplace revulsion to these houses and the classist and social xenophobia they enable remain unexamined.

Pools are often featured in tract mansions like this home outside Indianapolis (image from Zillow).

A host of new planning ideals propose to end the unchecked expansion of aesthetically and socially undesirable neighborhood forms and homes, building on a rich tradition of urban engineering that has often fumbled with the human experience of places like suburbs. One darling ideal for many ideologues and planners has now become the “tiny” aesthetic, referring to both the literal scale of residences as well as their environmental and social footprint. Yet as Brian Miller emphasized this week in his Legally Sociable blog, smaller does not necessarily mean new home models will be any cheaper (or even more sociable) than tract mansions.

A towering Ohio McMansion (image from Jenny)

There are indeed good reasons to champion more modest residential footprints in many communities, and it is foolish to simply ignore our own embodied experience of monster homes, regardless of whether such spaces provoke unvarnished horror or an appealing sense of affluence and retreat. Nevertheless, impressionistic dismissals of tract mansions risk dismissing alternative social, cultural, and class ideals in favor of shallow if not utterly ideological notions of appropriate style, community, and materiality. Minimally, very little good anthropology is done when scholars and observers do not have some sympathy for peoples’ experiences, desires, and feelings. Our commonplace distaste for oversized homes may indeed be well-placed for various social, community, and environmental reasons, but we risk dismissing families’ desire for tract mansions, and we hazard ignoring why material things like McMansions allow scholars to unleash their own classist, suburban, and material stereotypes.

]]>https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/09/10/spacious-vulgarity-the-aesthetics-and-morals-of-mcmansions/feed/5paulmullinsThis Washington DC home features a massive garage and an ecelctic mix of oversized architectural features typical of McMansions (image DC Urban Mom).nomoremcmansion-laTrat mansions typically feature massive entry foyers like this home in Cedar Hill Texas (image from Zillow)This massive home in Minnesota sits especially far-removed from surrounding homes, a theme critics often fix on when examining the community effects of massive homes (image from Bill Forbes).Opelnt kitchens are often featured in tract mansions like this example in Indianapolis (image from Zillow)Analyses of residential affluence often feature this New Jersey home that appeared in The Sopranos (image DrBob2012 Toronto Prelude Club).A typical tract mansion in Plano, Texas (image from Dean Terry).This Texas mansion somewhat cheekily embraces the notion of a "starter castle" (image from Zillow).This waterside Indianapolis home mixes a breadth of style and proportions in a 7450 square-foot home (image from Zillow).Pools are often featured in tract mansions like this home outside Indianapolis (image from Zillow).A towering Ohio McMansion (image from Jenny)Pokémon Go and the Sanctity of Heritage Landscapeshttps://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/pokemon-go-and-the-sanctity-of-heritage-landscapes/
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Soldiers’ graves at the Kiiminki Church in northern Finland.

One of Finland’s best-preserved wooden churches today sits outside Oulu, where the Kiiminki Church was completed in 1760. The modest cruciform frame church in northern Finland was designed by church architect Matti Honka and is noted for its spectacularly well-preserved altar painted by Mikael Toppelius in the 1780s. Like scores of other Finnish community church yards, the Kiiminki church is surrounded by a cemetery that includes the remains of local soldiers who fell during World War II. Often referred to as “heroes’ cemeteries” or “hero graves,” these resting places are staples of the Finnish countryside testifying to the Finns’ concrete World War II losses—and at least implicitly underscoring the nation’s defense against global super powers.

In the midst of the Kiiminki cemetery a stream of visitors moves across the site in a very distinctive motion familiar everywhere in the world with wireless coverage. In small groups shuffling forward, trading counsel, and studying their cell phone screens, Pokémon Go players hunt down virtual creatures in real-world surroundings including Kiiminki’s church and cemetery. The augmented reality mode of Pokémon Go transforms prosaic spaces—neighborhoods, religious spaces, historic sites–into newly engaged landscapes populated by multi-colored creatures, Poké Stops to fortify your avatar’s supplies, and Poké Gyms to train and bond with other players.

Pokemon players in a park in Brest, France (image G.Mannaerts)

Anxious observers almost instantly distinguished the characteristic Poké-walking movement—intently shuffling forward focused on the app’s visualization of local space—as “zombie-like,” implying or openly arguing that such apparent movement and consciousness is another confirmation that youth in particular and society in general have retreated from reality and apparently authentic human experiences. One critic of players crowding into a Sydney, Australia park argued that when gamers descended onto the park “it looked like the scene from World War Z with zombies about to breach and climb over the wall.” The Independent’s Michael O’Doherty dismissed Pokémon Go players in Dublin as “phone-addicted cretins” who confirm “that much of the general population is far dumber than we all feared.”

In a Huffington Post piece on Pokémon Go Dawn Q. Landau also invoked the rhetorical “zombie apocalypse” and acknowledged her own uneasiness that players “stagger around waving their phones in the air, or stare off at the landscape, with a feverish look: zombie.” However, she concludes that the game promotes genuine social and spatial engagement, suggesting that players are “talking to me, and happy to tell me about what they’re doing. They’re talking to each other, as they all try and get new high scores. They’re engaging in their communities and the out of doors. These zombies are not the brain dead creatures that I expected from a zombie apocalypse; they’re fun, and excited to spread more fun.”

This DoDuo was captured at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which has subsequently asked the game be excluded from the site.

Heritage sites perpetually wrestle with a host of practices that seem to violate mostly ambiguous implied codes of respect even as they struggle to narrate meaningful historical narratives. Conventionally heritage landscapes preserve history’s stages (e.g., battlefields) or provide contemplative spaces (e.g., museums) that invoke the power of place in service to heritage narratives. Particular places become cast as sanctified through their definition as commemorative spaces acknowledging tragedy and loss, and while few observers would defend Pokémon Go in Auschwitz the exclusion of the game from a host of house museums, public spaces, and historic sites is somewhat more problematic. The anxiety prompted by Pokémon Go may be that it ignores the veneer of heritage and imagines place in enormously broad, digitally mediated terms. Defenders of heritage sites may worry that visitors to attractions like the Tower of London are simply chasing Pokémon and ignoring the heritage itself, but they may also implicitly worry that those heritage narratives are boring if not outright irrelevant to many people.

Capturing a Pokemon at Stonehenge (image English Heritage)

This digitized heritage experience is perhaps compounded by generational distinctions; that is, a digitally literate youth culture seemingly far-removed from historical events may be departing from staid narrative mechanisms by experiencing heritage landscapes through distinctive digital, social, and embodied experiences. Some ideologues who resist the marriage of technology and heritage experiences risk ignoring their obvious conquest or reveal their own uneasiness about relinquishing control of spatial and interpretive experiences to phone-wielding visitors. However, most heritage scholars have accepted or embraced digital mechanisms to complicate conventional models for historic site visitation, which are often wed to structured historical narratives rooted in the corporeal experience of being in a heritage landscape. For instance, Basel Switzerland is one of the communities that has embraced Pokémon Go and integrated gameplay into visitors’ experience of Basel’s well-preserved medieval town center. Oregon’s Travel Portland is among the cities that provide visitors a guide to Pokémon Go spots at historic sites, museums, parks, and retail spaces alike; similar programs have been launched by Visit Anaheim, Rhode Island’s Go Providence, English Heritage, and Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where Pokémon can be caught at the fabled Revolutionary War Valley Forge National Historic Park. Colleen Morgan’s Middle Savagery blog nicely captures the potential of Pokémon Go, arguing that the “first lesson from Pokémon Go for archaeologists and heritage managers is that people are looking for novel, collective ways to experience and perform heritage.” Yet in response to Pokémon Go critic Stu Eve’s thoughtful but firm rejection of Pokémon Go on heritage sites, Morgan also worries that heritage scholars’ resistance to Pokémon Go may signal “a corresponding retreat from digital media in archaeology from some of the most forward thinking digital archaeologists.”

A Pokemon gym is purported to be located in the Pentagon itself.

Some tourism and heritage observers certainly are skeptical that Pokémon Go can fuel meaningful heritage experiences or is more than a momentary tourist fad. In late August, for instance, Thailand’s Tourism and Sports Ministry proposed to seed much of the country with Pokémon Go attractions, but Thai journalist Achara Deboonme expressed skepticism that “I can’t help thinking that this is a gimmick and that the tourism agency needs to think harder.” Deboonme argued that Thailand already “has great hospitality, food, culture and natural wonders with which to lure visitors,” and she was skeptical that the predominately youth following for the game would attract “`quality’ tourists who are willing to pay handsomely for products and services.”

A Spot Message screenshot of dead family members playing back messages at their burial site.

The phone app Spot Message uses an augmented reality system much like Pokémon Go to visit cemeteries and receive messages from the dearly departed. The app’s developer Yoshiyuki Katori indicated that the sudden death of an uncle “shattered the lives of his family. I also respected him a lot, so I would often visit his grave, consulting with him in my mind whenever I had issues concerning my business. I wondered how comforting it would be if he could talk to me at his grave, with messages like ‘How are you doing?’ and ‘Hang in there.’” Most media attention has focused on the app’s potential to record videos to be shown in cemeteries after death, but the technology could of course be used to document any place-based event, and augmented reality heritage apps have been examined and developed over more than 15 years (e.g., compare the 2001 ARCHEOGUIDE: first results of an augmented reality, mobile computing system in cultural heritage sites; more recently, examples include the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics’ 2015 newsletter on augmented reality applications).

A Pokémon Go stop in Bern near the Kulturcasin (image Fred Schaerli)

Augmented reality apps certainly could transform place-based heritage narratives by placing them in the hands of disparate storytellers likely to narrate prosaic and perhaps even idiosyncratic histories that break from grand interpretations. It is probably reasonable that some heritage landscapes remain outside augmented reality gaming, but it is difficult in many cases to distinguish between landscapes where heritage should be somehow sacrosanct and where it is open to a reasonable variety of experiences.

]]>https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/pokemon-go-and-the-sanctity-of-heritage-landscapes/feed/3paulmullinsSoldiers' graves at the Kiiminki Church in northern Finland.Pokemon players in a park in Brest, France (image G.Mannaerts)This DoDuo was captured at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., which has subsequently asked the game be excluded from the site.A Pokeon Go screenshot at the Sept. 11 MemorialCapturing a Pokemon at Stonehenge (image English Heritage)A Pokemon gym is purported to be located in the Pentagon itself.A Spot Message screenshot of dead family members playing back messages at their burial site.A Pokémon Go stop in Bern near the Kulturcasin (image Fred Schaerli)The Privacy of Style: Imagining Underwearhttps://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/the-privacy-of-style-imagining-underwear/
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On the other hand, though, perhaps the most interesting distinction of underwear branding is that (with the exception of strategically exposed waistbands) underwear do not publicly display the brand. Much of the theorizing about branding revolves around brands’ public display of style, affluence, and taste, but premium men’s underwear underscore that brands do not necessarily display taste; instead, they appeal to a consumer’s imagination of their stylishness, comfort, extravagance, and gratification. Even when they are displayed to our most intimate partners, underwear may be more about imagining how we feel and look than how we are actually seen. Our drawers may not confirm our affluence or style as much as they capture a self-absorbed and even unarticulated dimension of material desire.

Critics often fail to appreciate the depth of material imagination, instead caught up in their own bemusement over consumers’ economic irrationality or suggesting that foolish shoppers are succumbing to transparent advertising appeals. For instance, when Frigos first broke the $100 barrier four years ago the Huffington Post’s women’s editor Emma Gray lampooned the ludicrously priced underwear. Gray sounded an age-old argument that function should rationally trump price and style, suggesting that the flood of pricy men’s drawers demonstrates “that lots of things—specifically unmentionables—can be manufactured in such a way that you can convince consumers to pay way more for them than they’re worth.”

Efforts to explain nearly any material consumption routinely meet with some inexplicable dimensions of experience, desire, and imagination that fall outside the order of functional need, economic rationality, or ideology. For instance, in a 2012 Bjorn Borg survey (PDF) 59% of respondents indicated they buy underwear on sheer impulse (72% of French consumers professed no brand devotion whatsoever, while 26% of Americans favor a particular brand). Some things like undies are especially reliant on sparking individual imagination since their appeals do not rely on the narrowly visual dimensions of material culture. Underwear may reside on the boundaries of articulation—that is, most of us do not commonly share with others our day’s choice of drawers—but they conversely are an utterly bodily concrete experience, cradling us intimately even if that experience passes largely without conversation. The appeals made by 50 Cent or the allure of very expensive and technically sophisticated underwear certainly shape many peoples’ consumer experiences, but they likely do not explain much of our materiality. Underwear may heighten the utterly imaginative dimensions of style, comfort, and affluence found in most if not all material culture, but they underscore that much of consumption defies straightforward rational explanation.

]]>https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/the-privacy-of-style-imagining-underwear/feed/1paulmullinsThe anatomy of a $100 pair of underwear by Frigo.50 Cent shared this image of him in his Frigos on his instagram page, encouraging others to "be the best version of yourself."The Security of Light: Streetlights and Criminal Darknesshttps://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/06/23/the-security-of-light-streetlights-and-criminal-darkness/
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Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett presides over a June 9th news conference at the installation of the city’s first new streetlight in 35 years (image @IndyMayorJoe twitter)

This month a new streetlight was installed in Indianapolis, Indiana to surprising fanfare. Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett presided over a ceremony on Nowland Avenue, celebrating the city’s first new streetlight since 1981 and proclaiming that it and another 100 new lights would bring “light to neighborhoods that have been dark for far too long.” Thirty-five years ago Mayor William Hudnut announced a moratorium on new streetlights that was continued by the three subsequent Mayors. Hudnut’s policy was fundamentally a cost-cutting move to decrease the city’s electricity expenses and direct the city’s public works spending toward roads, sidewalks, and concrete infrastructure.

Streetlights were once prosaic objects we never contemplated, but now they have secured the status of things; that is, they have entered our consciousness because they are part of an urban fabric perceived to be malfunctioning. Most of the civic material landscape is utterly outside our consciousness until it fails in literal terms: for instance, a street is not part of our reflection until a pothole mars our motion, or only the absence of a maintained sidewalk compels us to articulate our pedestrian experience. Yet street lights and luminosity itself address a host of breakdowns in cities like Indianapolis that reach well beyond the functional purpose of lighting streets for foot and auto traffic. Light and visibility are viewed and experienced in distinctive social ways across the city: street lights are cast by various observers as symbols of government’s public service obligations, ideological mechanisms of urban surveillance, instruments of persistent racism and class prejudice, nocturnal pollution, and confirmation of apparently rampant criminality.

The newest streetlight in Indianapolis (@IndyMayorJoe)

The contemporary discussion over street lighting and luminosity frames how we see and imagine places, things, and people (compare Mikkel Bille and Tim Flohr SØrenson’s 2007 study of luminosity [PDF]). Streetlights emerge as rhetorical mechanisms that shape how we perceive urban places and darkness, especially their connections to criminality, often along class and color lines. Luminosity aspires to counter a distinctive contemporary anxiety of cities’ criminal darkness that Mayor Hogsett invoked when he proclaimed “No longer will we allow criminals to lurk in the shadows of our great neighborhoods. No longer will we be afraid to walk down the streets at night.” Regardless of whether that fear of public space is accurate or somewhat overstated Mayoral rhetoric, officials like Indianapolis’ Mayor worry that apprehension of urban crime will thwart their ambitions to attract consumers and residents to transformed 21st-century cities.

Public safety advocates routinely presume that light reduces crime, and that perception of urban light has a long heritage. In August, 1900, for example, the Indianapolis Journal lamented that the city was cutting off lights as a cost-cutting move, arguing that “thieves and marauders will hail this cutting off of street lights as a reform for their special benefit.” In 1945 the Indianapolis Recorderlobbied for new streetlights to combat crime near the city’s segregated African-American housing community Lockefield Gardens. The paper argued that the Lockefield neighborhood, “scene of numerous attacks and sluggings, is darker than hades at night, and we marvel at the fact that more women are not attacked in this district.”

The argument that lights inevitably curtail crime is not especially well-supported by research. For example, a 1991 study of London streetlights [PDF] argued that “better street lighting has had little or no effect on crime”; a 2015 study reached similar conclusions that there was no correlation between crime and lighting; and a 2002 study comparing Britain and the US [PDF] reached a more measured conclusion that increased lighting benefitted some neighborhoods. Nevertheless, street lights may have a genuine effect on our imagined sense of security, especially where people are apprehensive of particular public spaces and communities. In an ethnographic study in Utrecht, Jelle Brands, Tim Schwanen and Irina van Aalst found that interview subjects believed light “`normalised’ a site by deterring potential wrongdoers and produced safety in numbers as it meant more intensive use of streets after dark.” It is perhaps irrelevant if that fear of unknown threats concealed in the dark is unfounded; light in some peoples’ imaginations provides a way to anticipate the unknown. Yet what the Utrecht study underscored was that the sense of light’s security was directly linked to a strong notion of “undesired others”; that is, darkness tends to mobilize stereotypes that may lurk in the unlit city. Indianapolis’ Mayor invoked such anxieties of the unseen (yet strategically undefined) Other when he argued that the city’s new streetlights will “let us illuminate that which causes fear and trepidation in our neighborhoods.”

For some neighborhoods, simply successfully securing street lights from city hall may be as consequential as the luminosity they will provide. In 1983 Indianapolis Recorder columnist Donald Carpenter complained that an especially busy stretch of North West Street in the predominately African-American community had no street lights, but “get through one of the historic districts and you’ll find more lights in the alleys than in many black residential communities.” In 1959 a community group had complained about street lighting on that very same stretch of North West Street, when “concern over the increase in robberies, purse grabbings, muggings and other crimes of violence” prompted 22 householders to petition the city to install four street lights. The residents’ request indicated that “it is very dark in this block … and also dangerous because of thieves, drunkards, and robbers. We have little children and teenagers whose lives are in danger whenever they go outside or on the streets after dark.”

The perception that street lights deter crime probably hyperbolizes the power of visibility, but it also simplifies the complex ways that light is experienced in a host of neighborhoods and by a wide range of people. For some neighborhoods in Indianapolis, light has been simply one of many persistently denied civil privileges, and advocacy for streetlights is part of a broader demand for a full range of fundamental city services (e.g., sewer, trash pickup, schools, etc). Streetlights provide a sense of genuine security to many people, and it is not unlikely that streetlights and similar infrastructural maintenance can have a positive galvanizing effect on neighborhood cohesion and pride. Nevertheless, at the same time they risk masking the ways that darkness evokes deep-seated anxieties of the city and our neighbors. That apprehension has some basis in the sober realities of urban criminality; however, it is fueled by xenophobic media and popular cultural caricatures of criminality, the city, and urbanites that Indianapolis’ streetlight campaign risks reproducing.

]]>https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/06/23/the-security-of-light-streetlights-and-criminal-darkness/feed/1paulmullinsIndianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett presides over a news conference at the installation of the city's first new streetlight in 35 years (image Joe Hogsett twitter)The newest streetlight in Indianapolis (@IndyMayorJoe)Boredom in the Ruins of the Mallhttps://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/06/03/boredom-in-the-ruins-of-the-mall/
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A French Claire’s shop.

A host of observers repeatedly prophesy the death of the traditional shopping mall, disparaging the regional mall as an archaic spatial, material, and social experience. Somewhat paradoxically, many artists, scholars, and explorers pick over the literal ruins of dead malls in an exercise that in various hands reflectively dissects materiality, transparently bemoans lost youth, or launches another attack on mass consumption. Americans seem quite fascinated by the ruination of the enclosed regional shopping mall, fixated on its hulking material remnants, anxiously monitoring its demise in surviving malls, and acknowledging our boredom with much of the remaining shopping mall landscape.

A Claire’s shopper in front of one of the shop’s accessory walls.

Those people forecasting the mall’s demise may have felt their pessimism confirmed by last week’s news that the ubiquitous mall chain Claire’s is fighting off bankruptcy (a decline marketers have been watching for over a year). Claire’s decline may indeed confirm malls’ fundamental design liabilities and reflect broad economic and demographic shifts, but our fascination with the declining mall almost certainly risks pronouncing their death sentence too soon. While shifts in consumption and settlement patterns have transformed the contemporary shopping landscape for malls, our sheer boredom with the homogeneity and predictability of malls may be more dangerous to their survival than factors such as our attraction to online shopping or the decline of department stores.

For those wishing to celebrate doughnuts, Claire’s offers these doughnut earrings.

Claire’s decline follows the demise of many other retailers who tied their fates to shopping malls. The cemetery of mall chains includes men’s clothier Chess King (1968-1995), Thom McAn shoe stores (introduced in 1922, the brand is now sold only at Sears), B. Dalton booksellers (1966-2010), Sam Goody’s (nearly all converted to f.y.e. stores in 2008), and working-class women’s clothier Casual Corner (1950-2005). Other brands or chains have survived, some dramatically transformed and others on a more modest scale: for instance, novelty merchandiser Spencer’s Gifts continues to peddle black light posters, crude gag gifts, and “irreverent” things in more than 650 US stores; since 1987, Orange Julius’s legendary powdered egg drinks have been sold by Dairy Queen; and teen apparel retailer Aeropostale filed for bankruptcy last month.

Once viewed as mesmerizing places of material plenty and deeply embedded in our collective imagination, dying or emptied malls now dot much of an American suburban periphery glutted with retail space. On the one hand, consumers entertain a romanticized nostalgia for malls and particular chains, especially those that have now disappeared. This may not diverge from much of the popular fascination with ruins, though the anxiety inspired by dying malls is perhaps more unsettling than the corpses of now-emptied malls. On the other hand, though, nearly none of that nostalgia focuses on material things. Many of the voices memorializing malls simply wax nostalgic for their youth, rarely invoking the actual material things in malls or even the malls themselves: that is, a very modest amount of the popular commentary on malls’ demise laments the loss of commodities like Chess King jackets, and few people seem to hope that fountains, vinyl plants, and the unmistakable odor of Sbarro’s will become the standard for consumer design. Instead, most people at the regional mall’s wake focus on the social experience of mall shopping itself. This may suggest that malls’ zenith was not especially firmly tied to commodities, but was instead a staging ground for the shopping experience itself.

Nevertheless, the fascinated rhetoric over dead malls and the lack of surprise over Claire’s decline seems to confirm that we are generally disinterested in or actively dislike shopping malls. Twenty years ago suburban scholar Kenneth T. Jackson may well have put his finger on the pulse of this decline. Jackson recognized that mall construction and rental profits began to decline in the late 1970’s, and mall construction declined consistently after 1988. Jackson rooted this in something quite basic, suggesting that “Americans have finally become bored with malls or perhaps just tired of the effort it takes to navigate them.” The most fascinating implication of his analysis was that “malls have become so homogenized and predictable that they have lost much of their entertainment value.”

A sample of Claire’s broad sampling of glitter products.

This probably comes as bad news for Claire’s, whose appeal revolves around novelty: Claire’s provides a host of unexpected or singular things that somehow capture a consumer’s idiosyncratic imagination. Claire’s relies on shoppers actually coming to the mall in the first place, and if shoppers have indeed become bored with the mall shopping experience they will never be beguiled by a unicorn rainbow trinket box. Many mall stores rely on a similar appeal to novelty to spur purchase: for instance, Yankee Candle simply hopes to capture our unexpected fascination with the odor of magical frosted forest; Spencer’s aspires to convince us that a gag gift will be a fine gift for a buddy; and Brookstone gambles that we will be enticed by a neck and shoulder sport massager. Like most shopping spaces, malls fundamentally “work” when they encourage imagination, and malls intensify that introspective day-dreaming by fostering experiences more like an amusement park than a Wal-Mart.

Perhaps the greater failure of the enclosed mall is that it has abandoned almost all pretense to being civic space that reaches beyond shopping alone. Much of the promise that planners once placed in malls as walkable civic spaces integrated with surrounding communities has instead resulted in private patrolled fortresses ringed by oceans of parking. Victor Gruen planned perhaps the country’s first mall, the 1956 Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which he imagined to be a mixed used civic space that included shopping as simply one dimension of community life. However, Gruen eventually was dismayed to realize that enclosed malls did not become broadly based walkable communities.

Despite all the gloom for the conventional regional mall, perceptions that the mall is inevitably dying are probably premature. In 2015 one report observed that about 80% of America’s malls were considered “healthy” (that is, with a vacancy rate less than 10%). However, Kenneth Jackson was probably correct in his instinct that the interchangeable regional mall–held down by the likes of Victoria’s Secret and Yankee Candle, engulfed by a jarring asphalt expanse of parking lots, and bearing only the slightest pretense to being a social space beyond consumption–may be on its last legs.

Rudolf Hess’ grave was the scene of neo-Nazi pilgrimages until it was moved from this plot in 2011.

The Wal-Hamdu-Lillah Cemetery hails itself as California’s first Islamic cemetery, a 20-acre mortuary and burial ground established in 1998. The cemetery adheres to Sharia burial rites, which include the ritual washing of the corpse, shrouding of the body, and burial without a casket, usually with little or no burial markers. In January it was confirmed that the more than 1000 people buried in Wal-Hamdu-Lillah include Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, fundamentalist extremists who killed 14 people in a December 2015 attack in San Bernadino. The two were themselves killed hours after their attack, and it apparently took a week to find an Islamic cemetery that would accept their remains. Local observers soon suspected that the killers were interred in the cemetery in Rosamond, and the Mayor of neighboring Lancaster theatrically directed his City Attorney to prepare legislation that would outlaw the local burial of participants in terrorist acts. The anxiety sparked by the couple’s burial reflects their status among the most repugnant of the dead, people so evil that their physical remains threaten our common values after their death. Such figures’ literal corporeal remains hold a persistent grip on our collective anxiety, their memories firmly planted in heritage discourses even as we attempt to efface their human remains from the landscape.

Many of history’s darkest figures were denied a formal burial place primarily to prevent their graves from becoming pilgrimage sites. For instance, nearly all Nazi war criminals were committed to anonymous resting places to suppress lingering Nazi sympathies. SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler killed himself after his capture by the British, and he was buried at Luneburg Heath, in northern Germany. Allies were already wary of the potential that the graves of people like Himmler could become rallying places for extremists. A British soldier who helped bury Himmler was instructed that the location “`was not to be told to anyone for if some fanatical Germans got to hear about it they would have dug up the coffin and made a big parade with his body and made a martyr and worshipped (sic) him like a God.’” The Lancaster, California Mayor said much the same about Farook and Malik’s burial, worrying that it would become “an attraction for martyrdom.”

After Spandau Prison’s final prisoner Rudolf Hess died, the jail was torn down and its structural remains pulverized (image Bauamt Süd).

Evil figures have often been denied identifiable resting places to defuse contemporary extremists who might be galvanized by pilgrimage to such a resting place. Journeys of spiritual consequence extend beyond formal faith to civil religions, heritage tourism, and even popular cultural fandoms (e.g., compare visitation to Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris). The remains of revered figures often become one of the key places followers visit on journeys that fortify deeply held values and provide spiritual inspiration. The distinction between pilgrimage and tourism is certainly fluid, but it perhaps revolves around the degree to which the emotional experience of pilgrimage and visitation shapes the visitor’s subsequent social and political activity; that is, a sacred journey binds us to a collective that shares and acts upon deeply held values.

In the wake of World War II the Allies were wary that places like grave sites could sustain or ignite future political extremism, so the most prominent Nazi war criminals’ remains were not accorded formal burial places. When Berlin fell in 1945, the Soviets collected the remains of Hitler, Eva Braun, Joseph Goebbels, and Goebbels’ six children and wife; by most accounts their collective remains were eventually cremated in about 1970 and scattered in the Biederitz River, though fragments of Hitler’s skull are rumored to remain in Russian hands. The 10 Nazis executed October 16, 1946 following the Nuremberg trials (and Herman Goring, who killed himself the night before) were cremated and their ashes scattered in a river.

A memorial to Kamizake pilots at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo (image Takashi Ueki).

Wholesale removal of Nazi landscapes is practically impossible, but there have been consistent efforts to efface the mortal remains of war criminals and ideological martyrs. Nazi graves that had revered symbolic status during the war were instantly destroyed or had their party symbols removed at war’s end. For instance, in December, 1926 Horst Wessel joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (also known as the SA or the “brownshirts”). During the formative years of the party, Wessel worked closely with the Berlin regional party leader, Joseph Goebbels. In January, 1930 Wessel was murdered by a Communist party member, and after his death Wessel’s Berlin gravesite became the scene of Nazi propaganda events. After the war, Wessel’s grave was defaced to remove its party references, and his body may also have been removed (the final remnants of the memorial, which also marked his father’s grave, were finally removed in 2013). Nevertheless, visitors to the former burial site continue to leave flowers, its effacement insufficient to erase the symbolism of the place.

Reinhard Heydrich’s burial memorial was removed after the war.

Likewise, Berlin’s Invalid Cemetery (Invalidenfriedhof) lay in East Berlin along the Berlin Wall, and over a third of the post-1748 military cemetery was destroyed in the immediate wake of the war for guard tower and road access construction. Among the wartime burials in the cemetery was SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, who chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference that articulated the concrete plans for the “Final Solution” for Jewish genocide. Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic), Heydrich was attacked in Prague in May, 1942 and died a week later. Heydrich was accorded a lavish funeral in Prague and then buried in a second ceremony in Berlin, where Himmler delivered the eulogy at a funeral at which Hitler presented Heydrich with the German Order, the highest award of the Third Reich. Heydrich was buried in the Invalids Cemetery, but the war ended before an impressive memorial by Nazi sculptor Arno Breker and architect Wilhelm Kreis could be constructed. The exact location of Heydrich’s grave is not clearly documented, and there is suggestive evidence that Heydrich’s remains were removed at war’s end by his widow. Yet as at Wessel’s grave, neo-Nazis continue to herald Heydrich’s ideological zealotry for the Nazi cause and leave flowers and offerings at the grave site.

The abhorrent dead are defined by their death in service to an evil cause that we worry will live on or be revived after their deaths. That may distinguish the likes of Timothy McVeigh, Reinhard Heydrich, and the San Bernadino murderers from Jeffrey Dahmer, whose reprehensible acts were driven by mental illness rather than ideology (Dahmer’s cremated remains were divided between his parents). All of these figures capture our attention because they did unimaginable things, and effacing their bodies attempts to deny them the dignity and mourning we theoretically accord to even our most humble peer.

Dark tourism acknowledges our fascination with the concrete sites of perpetration, like Wannsee, the Nuremberg rally grounds, or concentration camps. However, it somewhat uneasily views the literal bodies of perpetrators because acknowledging their humanity hazards failing to distinguish between perpetrators and victims. The corporeal remains of such figures risks separating them from their victims, providing a place for mourning an evil person in ways that humanize them outside the unimaginable acts that now define them. Effacing these graves or denying evil people identifiable burials does not efface them from heritage or even from material space, but it aspires to place them beyond the pale of place and separate their bodies and acts from our own.

]]>https://paulmullins.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/abhorrent-bodies-burying-evil/feed/1paulmullinsRudolf Hess' grave was the scene of neo-Nazi pilgrimages until it was moved from this plot in 2011 .After Spandau Prison's final prisoner Rudolf Hess died, the jail was torn down and its structural remains pulverized.A memorial to Kamizake pilots at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.Reinhard Heydrich's burial memorial was removed after the war.